I have had to explain many times in the last year why I, a normal developer, am involved with Information Worker which is (mostly) a SharePoint group? I am involved because I believe that the idea of a SharePoint Developer is a fast dying one and soon, people who call themselves a SharePoint Developer will be using it just as a way to justify higher consulting costs more than anything else.
I do not think this is because SharePoint usage is dying, rather the growth (maturity and adoption) of SharePoint is causing SharePoint developers to die off. This is not because SharePoint is so user friendly we no longer need custom code, because we still need custom code in SharePoint. The two reasons for my thinking this is based on two questions, “What SharePoint development really is?” and secondly “What Microsoft is doing about SharePoint development?”.
What is SharePoint development really? In SharePoint versions past (2007 and before) you would develop code for SharePoint using development concepts unique to SharePoint. Now that SharePoint has matured, development of the code for SharePoint involves concepts that are universal to development. There are two examples which come to mind which highlight the maturity of development concepts. First is web parts, which are now the same as ASP.NET web parts, and secondly is web services (and OData if you have SharePoint 2010). Both of these concepts are the exact same as used by many other products made by Microsoft and other companies. For example if you understand how to get data from Twitter, with OData in SharePoint 2010 you will understand how to get data from SharePoint. Yes, you will have some specific bindings/API’s/code that are SharePoint specific but the concepts, which is the difficult part to learn, are the same.
I mentioned two questions and the second is about Microsoft and it’s strategy for SharePoint development, in particular their 2010 strategy (Visual Studio 2010 + SharePoint 2010). A SharePoint developer used to have to go and download special files, install them, fixed issues, try installing again, fix more issues, have special machines or virtual machines to run SharePoint on and so on. The actual process of just writing code for SharePoint meant that you became elite because you had to go through a ritual of fire before you could start. Microsoft have really made SharePoint 2010 development simple and more importantly easy to start with, both by making SharePoint run natively on Windows 7 and also by including everything you need for development within Visual Studio 2010 from day one. It is as hard start wring code for SharePoint now as it is to make a WPF application!
What I am trying to convey is that previously a SharePoint developer had “paid their school fees” by learning so much that was so specific to the process of SharePoint development that they actually had earned a special title. Now that all those barriers have been removed, the title of SharePoint developer no longer applies, we are all just developers now!